BY JOHN K. WILSON

Last week, the Nassau Community College Board of Trustees unanimously approved a new News Media Relations policy that is a tremendous victory for freedom of the press, reflecting the importance of the AAUP and other groups fighting for campus liberty.

At the Nov. 13 Board meeting, President W. Hubert Keen declared, “We’ve gone through two rounds of revision of the policy. I think that we are finally to the point where it now assures First Amendment rights as well as addressing the College’s role in communicating its image to the public.”

NCC’s previous media policy was a terrible infringement on freedom of the press and the academic freedom of faculty and staff to speak to the media. It required faculty and staff to get permission from the administration to contact the media, and forced the media have minders follow them anywhere on a public college campus.

In every way, the repressive aspects of that policy have been revised and improved to conform with the First Amendment. By removing the mandatory rules and replacing them with voluntary language, NCC has fixed a terrible policy while still communicating its desire to have employees work with public relations staff in dealing with the media. While not everything is perfect about the new policy (it’s dubious that a college should be urging news media to have a staff minder follow them everywhere on campus), it is a great model for other colleges to follow at a time when awful campus media policies are proliferating across the country. Perhaps other colleges will learn the lesson of shared governance, too: If NCC had simply sought the advice of faculty before imposing a new policy, they could have avoided this entire embarrassing debacle.

The campus AAUP chapter and faculty member Kimberley Reiser, Chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Community Colleges, took the lead in fighting this policy. Reiser made a presentation about the policy at the AAUP Annual Conference, and also contacted me and Frank LoMonte since we spoke at a panel on campus media policies at the conference. In September, I wrote about the problems with NCC’s policy on AcademeBlog.

Others were active in opposing this media policy. In February 2017, the Academic Senate Executive Committee, chaired by Evelyn Deluty, submitted comments noting that “Policy 3100 forbids our contact with the press, thereby silencing our voices as professionals,” and the Academic Senate passed a resolution asking for the policy to be changed. FIRE wrote letters to the NCC administration demanding changes and wrote about the case on their blog.

Because of this national and campus pressure, NCC administrators scuttled a plan in September to have the Board pass minor revisions to the media policy without addressing its most serious problems. Instead, the administration was forced to back down completely and adopt the new policy in light of the critiques.

There’s an important lesson here: Colleges such as NCC are creating repressive media policies because they are obsessed with public relations and brand management. The only way to get them to change these terrible policies is by imposing a public relations cost and tarnishing their brand as censorship.